Contrapuntal Affiliations: Edward Said and Freud's Moses

Freud and the Non-European. Edward Said. London: Verso, 2003. 84 pp. $12.92.

Edward Said's penultimate book is the text of a lecture on "Freud and the non-European" delivered under controversial circumstances in London toward the end of his life. The original lecture took place on December 6, 2001, and he died September 25, 2003. The text is a classic example of Said's "contrapuntal" reading of an author, by which he extracts a work—in this case, Moses and Monotheism—from its original time and place and reinserts it among the newly constellated quandaries of our own day. More specifically, Said reads Freud's strange book on the origins of Judaic monotheism as a meditation on heterogeneous identity, one that he casts in the teeth of an Israeli culture allegedly bent on essentializing an exclusively Jewish and Western history for the region of Palestine. Whereas Freud strove to create a deep psychological description of anti-Semitism in Moses by mounting an alternative history of Judaism, Said turns the book more pointedly into an admonitory work that is at heart anti-Zionist. The most biting statement to this effect is worth citing in full:

Quite differently from the spirit of Freud's deliberately provocative reminders that Judaism's founder was a non-Jew, and that Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian, non-Jewish monotheism, Israeli legislation countervenes, represses, and even cancels Freud's carefully maintained opening out of Jewish identity towards its non-Jewish background. The complex layers of the past, so to speak, have been eliminated by official Israel. So—as I read him in the setting of Israel's ideologically conscious policies—Freud, by contrast, had left considerable room to accommodate Judaism's non-Jewish antecedents and contemporaries. That is to say: in excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian) which his demonstration in Moses and Monotheism goes a great distance to discover and thus restore to scrutiny.

(44)

Such contrapuntal reading has its risks, of course, not least of which is the considerable grey zone that lies between Said's poignantly politicized reconfigurations and overt acts of unnuanced ventriloquism. To his great credit, Said developed a sophisticated theoretical basis for this kind of operation, and one must grasp the full import of his technique (especially in relation to his notion of "traveling theory") before launching a counterattack in vindication of the texts he is reconfiguring.¹ It is in fact quite a tribute to Freud's Moses that Said takes up the challenge of this untimely text from a newly urgent perspective. As he says by way of justification in Freud and the Non-European, "Texts that are inertly of their time stay there: those which brush up unstintingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation after generation" (27). That being said, however, there are some serious problems with this little book that merit fleshing out, but not because Freud needs to be saved from conscription into Said's conflict with Israel. Rather, the problems say a great deal about Said, one of the most public intellectuals of our time and a man well worth understanding—all the more so now that he is gone.

Simply put, the only way to enlist Moses and Monotheism in an open conflict with the State of Israel à la Said is by a highly selective—even faulty—reading of the text. Let us leave aside the prima facie absurdity of using Freud's book as a valid counter-history to array against official Israeli histories (a point easily made by Jewish reviewers who are routinely hostile to Said, such as The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier [2003]). No one takes Moses seriously at face value for its historical thesis, with perhaps the sole exception of Ahmed Osman (1990).² The deeper problem is that Said fails to read Freud thoroughly...